The issue of Iron Age urn burials in the Iron Age of Southern Portugal: an integrated review

Abstract

Urn burials as a funerary practice deserved considerable interest throughout the history of research on the Iron Age of southern Portugal, having played a role in the construction of historical-cultural models in which demic and cultural diffusion were highlighted. Despite the criticism leveled at those models and the nuances which were introduced into the interpretation of the Iron Age historical and cultural sequence of Southern Portugal, no systematic critical revision of this burial mode has been produced. With the data currently available, it can nonetheless be revisited in a longue durée perspective, exploring the relationships between the Early Iron Age urn burials and those dated in the second half of the 1^st millennium BCE. At the same time, the increase of the available data allows for a nuanced rethinking of the cultural dynamics underlying the diffusion of the practice of urn burials, painting a more complex and multicultural panorama.